One of the world’s biggest video game franchises is back.
“Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3+4” debuted late last week. The game remakes and bundles classic titles from 2001 and 2002.
“Skateboarding has come so far in these last 20-plus years,” said Tony Hawk. “We’re celebrating it in digital form — I mean, not just bringing back the iconic levels and characters from those early games, but also updating it with newer generation skaters.”
Hawk became synonymous with the sport through the “Pro Skater” series, which launched in 1999 and earned more than $1 billion.
Skateboarding has come a long way and, in some ways, gone back. Your style of skating, we understand, is making a big comeback: vert skating, that you perfected.
“I would say that this sort of hybrid of street and vert is what we call park skating. Through that, people had a growing interest in the vert aspect because there are some vertical elements to park skating. And I would say within the last five years, we’ve seen a resurgence of skaters. And it’s been a blast. I mean, I do an annual event called Vert Alert in Salt Lake City. And five years ago, we were having a challenge just finding enough women to fill a competitive field. And now we have to have a qualifying event before the actual event because there are so many more.”
When we say vertical, let’s explain. You were the first person to perform this 900-degree trick. You then released a video game in 1999 with your name on it. What was in your head when you launched that?
“I didn’t plan to do that that night. I had never actually done a 900. So my best trick at the time was something else. I made it pretty early on into the event, so I didn’t have a backup plan after that because I thought it was going to take me the entire duration of the event to make that one trick. So, for me, the next trick on the list would be a 900, which is something I’ve been trying up to that point for almost 14 years, off and on. And I had committed to it a few times for about three years prior to that and broke my ribs. So I thought I’d given it my all. And I didn’t know if I could actually do it.
“But I figured in that context, in that scenario, I’m willing to try to do this again and get hurt if necessary. So what was going through my head was, ‘I’m going to make this or they’re going to take me out on a stretcher!’ That skateboard that I did it on is going up for auction in September. Part of the proceeds go to the skatepark project to help build skate parks in underserved areas.”
Talk about your skate park project. We understand some of the money for it came from when you went on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ You won $120,000 and put it into building more than 500 skate parks across the country. Why?
“Because I feel like when I grew up, I grew up near one of the last skate parks that was open in the United States. There was only a handful at the time, and I felt like I found my salvation there, and I found my lifelong friends. And so the best I could do with my success is to give those kinds of facilities to kids who feel disenfranchised, who feel like they might choose to skate, but they don’t have any support in it and to have a place to connect and hang out. And so we started with that seed money 20-plus years ago, and it has grown. We’ve given away over $9 million now. We have helped develop over almost a thousand skate parks across the U.S., and it’s definitely my proudest work.”
Skateboarding is now an Olympic sport. The Olympics are going to be in your backyard in Los Angeles in 2028. How do you want that to go?
“I don’t have any agenda. I would love for vertical halfpipe skating to be included as a discipline in the Olympics. It is not going to be a category in L.A., but there is still a chance for it to be included somehow, maybe as an exhibition sport. So I’m going to keep campaigning for that. But what I would like to see is just the overall appreciation, and for it to be on prime time. And I feel like if it were ever going to be highlighted the most in the Olympic Games, it would be in Los Angeles, which is kind of the birthplace of modern skateboarding anyway.”
Do you think the ‘Pro Skater’ games, past and present, are responsible for bringing people to the sport?
“I think so, especially in our early games there. There is a whole generation of people who skate now who have told me specifically that they started skating because they played the game. In fact, there are a few pros now who say the same thing, and some of the tricks that they learned were tricks that they did in the game, thinking they were based in reality when they weren’t. We just put them in there because it was fantastical! So. Ironically, it influenced real-life skating.”
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James Perkins Mastromarino produced and edited this segment for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Perkins Mastromarino also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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